If I were to succinctly sum up what February was like in Iceland I’d have to go with: terrible weather. Yes, February was probably one of the most dreary months weather-wise that I can recall. If it wasn’t snowing it was raining, and if it somehow wasn’t precipitating then it was most assuredly still cloudy and windy. Oh the wind. But hey, at least we’re gaining sunlight back pretty quickly!

Of course dreary weather and Iceland go hand in hand and the wind is almost always a constant anyway. So what made February stand out in a bad way? Well, it was probably the fact that it was just so systemically bad. There were only a few brief breaks, but otherwise it was snow, snow, and more snow. Here’s a look out of our window, for reference:

Yep, white-out conditions. However, in retrospect even that wasn’t bad because at least you could (sort of) see through the window, on other days the windows just looked liked this:

Yessir, nothing like ice-covered windows to start your day! Those are the days where you just want to crawl right back in bed, but sadly the ability to do just that seems so rare anymore. Instead you need to get up for one reason or another and head out into the frigid world. For awhile even our welcome mat was entirely froze solid.

There’s some irony here someplace.

Though, as I mentioned last time, our walkways get pretty hammered with snow and ice so I guess a frozen welcome mat isn’t too surprising.

Beyond the threshold isn’t a whole lot better, just more snow and grey skies – and also the wind.

It’s more pretty when you get to look a photo of it, because then you don’t have to deal with the wind. 🙂

Yep, ole’ February didn’t offer much in the way of enjoyable weather. I mean I generally like snow, but it was just so grey that it got pretty old.

Fortunately Meem left behind a daylight lamp for us, which helps! Also, it’s not like we have to spend all our time outdoors. We find plenty of excuses to just chill inside – be they legitimate (such as a swarm of papers I’ll talk about in a minute) – or slightly less legitimate (but shhh) such as our participation in Bolludagur.

The cream puff went down nicely with some yummy oat milk – something we’ve become quite a fan of since moving here!

We put it in our coffee pretty much every day, at least when we can find it, the closest store sells out of the oat milk a lot.

Or maybe we just drink too much coffee. Nah. 😀

Though to be fair I did go heavy on the coffee front during February. Not really because of my thesis per se, but rather because of the “productive procrastination” I’ve done as a way of avoiding my thesis as much as possible. In fairness to me, as the title implies, the procrastination was indeed quite productive. Over the course of about 30 days I wrote five papers, which is to say I completed all the papers for all my classes in one month. If 30 days doesn’t sound too impressive, that timeline is also filled with gaps due to exams and some travel. So if you just look at the number of days that I actually worked on papers, you’re looking more at 5 papers in 14 days – and these aren’t short papers either, nor are they on topics I find especially interesting. It’s without a doubt the biggest “paper push” I’ve ever done academically, and while the per-day writing period for the thesis will surpass the paper-month of February, it won’t generate as many separate papers on disparate topics.

So yeah, for February you could accurately, if not disparagingly, quote that famous Christmas song, “Oh, the weather outside is frightful, But inside you have to write papers.” Yet, despite typing so much that my carpal tunnel flared up, the good news is that insofar as things go that I loathe, only 2 group projects and a bunch of random case assignments stand between me and exams. With any luck I’ll be done with one group assignment by the end of this week, leaving little left for me to use to productively procrastinate on my thesis. That’s a good thing, while I’m a “good” productive procrastinator, I’m not so good at truly procrastinating.

Anyways, whining about the weather and school aside, February did offer some good times! 😀

For starters, February marks both SB and Valentino’s birthdays! This year SB is 47 and Valentino is 5. To celebrate, Valentino even got a card from one of his plushie friends, which while not specifically about his birthday, was good timing for it!

If you’ve followed this blog for awhile, you’ll remember that for Valentino + SB’s birthdays it is a tradition for me and the other Boys to make them a cake. Tristen was my original co-baker, but now it’s extended to Pig and Pigsten as well (with a guest spot for Broli this time too!). We also make them dinner, which usually features salmon. As for the cake, a staple over the years has always been strawberries – which makes sense given their favored status for both SB and Valentino, but this year they were especially yummy as a nice “summer taste” against the crummy February weather!

So, with strawberry cake in mind, the Boys and I got to it.

We don’t have much space to work here, nor do we have many implements, but we make due with our cheap and/or “salvaged” kitchenware! Cooking with the Boys is always an adventure, for instance Pigsten and Broli had to be kept out of the batter, I mean literally kept out, as in their entire bodies.

While the cake was baking we got started on the frosting. Our local store doesn’t have a big baking section, but we’ve made due with limited baking supplies in the past, and as such have gotten good at using pudding or jello to make flavor combinations that aren’t available at the store, in this case strawberry!

We also decided that strawberry icing wasn’t quite enough in the way of strawberries, so we sliced up some real strawberries and decorated the cake with them! Both SB and Valentino were big fans, and it tasted yummy!

Valentino about to dive into his cake – if he looks less than thrilled that’s just his “concentrating” look he gets when it’s time to eat, Polar bears take their food very seriously.

Plus, the fun didn’t stop with salmon and cake, we got a surprise package from my Grandma as well. It contained one of the most glorious things on planet Earth: party mix.

My Grandma had actually shipped this package way back in December, it just took for-ever to get here. Heck we didn’t even know about it until MIL asked if we’d ever received the package from my Grandma. We were like “Uh, what?” Turns out it was on its way, it was just moving very, very slowly. However, when it finally arrived it was in good shape and the party mix was still nicely sealed and not stale, woo!

Whether you know it as a party mix, snack mix, Chex mix, some chow variant, or something entirely else, there is only one thing you really need to know. There is my Grandma’s version, and then there are failed imitations. Fight me brah.

In fairness most Grandma things are the best in the world, this just so happens to be party mix. I’ve had it from several other people, and I’ve even had it from people copying the Grandma Recipe™ – and the result is always the same, “not even close” – and don’t even get me started on the store-bought stuff. 😛

Anyways, this is all to say that we were very excited for a big bag of party mix! We somehow even managed to not eat it in one sitting. Heck I think the bag lasted over a week.

But that wasn’t the only package we received, MIL had sent SB a birthday present, but in the box with SB’s present she included some of the Annie’s Bunnies that we used to love so much!

For reference the bunnies are gone too. 🙂

So yes, I guess you could say that we did what most people do when the weather outside is nasty, we ate – a lot. Also, in case you were wondering, not all of it was snack food, we even made a few fancy things like smoked lamb open-face sandwiches.

Which paired exceptionally well with a couple of nice Scottish beers!

The near-beer on the right was just the warm-up beer.

I guess the message here is that while the outside world in Iceland in February wasn’t too enjoyable, that the inside world was still full of good times. Sure, writing five papers wasn’t really fun, but it was still productive, though I guess now I have less excuses to keep nudging my thesis back. We also had a bit of travel that was very exciting, if not even more difficult insofar as the outdoors are concerned, but that’s for next post!

In the meantime, I’ll end on a positive note, which is that I’m currently looking out the window at bright blue skies (and it’s not dark at 3pm anymore!). It’s still quite cold, but blue skies are blue skies. 🙂

Welcome to Dinosaur Bear’s version of a February check-in. Nothing too exciting to discuss this time around, but I won’t let that stop me from filling up some more space on the interwebs.

I suppose the biggest piece of news is that after months of preparatory work to accomplish oh-so-very-little on the administrative side of things (see “meh“) I’ve finally put pen to paper on the ole’ thesis. I mean that metaphorically of course, pens are extinct. That pen on your desk doesn’t actually exist, it’s just a replica pen used to fool us into thinking wild pens didn’t go extinct in the late 90s.

To be even more precise, I haven’t even really started writing the body of the thesis, but I have begun working on the structure of it. This means lots of revisions with supervisors, and of course one supervisor telling you to do something that the other supervisor specifically tells you not to do (hint: go with whoever is actually giving you a grade). So that’s gonna be fun. Now, regarding the thesis, it’s big. The thesis itself is over an entire semester’s worth of credit load, which isn’t surprising considering how much larger it will be than my undergraduate thesis. I think the page total will be somewhere around 120 pages at 12-pont font and 1.5 spacing (alas double-spacing isn’t a thing here) on A4 paper. While not a tome by any means, it’s certainly the largest, most complicated thing I’ll have ever written and hopefully, Baby Jasus willing, will ever write (at least unless I want to). It will also be my first piece of any real size to be published! Yep, it will be peer reviewed and published including a print version! So that’s kind of cool. But also not cool, because more eyes means more expectations. Where are those 1000-2000 word undergrad papers with zero citation checking when you need them!? (In a landfill, that’s where – or to be optimistic, recycled into something more useful, like toilet paper)

Anyways, why I’m slightly more stressed about it than might be normal isn’t because of the length or depth required. It’s the timeline. Without getting into specifics (see here) I’m going to be attempting to do the thesis with only 42% of the time as the program (really vaguely) intended. This is hugely problematic for a variety of reasons – the largest of which is that I’ll be taking 60 credits. Yes you read that correctly S-I-X-T-Y credits at once. I have also have a part-time job on top of that, which granted is a small number of flexible hours but it’s still a thing.

So that’s what I’m concerned about, the time-frame. I’ve started an aggressive strategy towards my other classes which involves writing papers months in advance and that’s gotten really draining really fast. But hey, I have a pretty good track-record of spewing out A/A+ papers (of usual graduate school length) in one day – though it makes for a really shitty day, unless you own stock in coffee and/or energy drink companies.

Now, with all that said, here is my goal: not to turn Dinosaur Bear into a massive thesis QQ-fest. I’ve found that there is this really odd culture of incessantly crying about your thesis at all levels, be it Bachelor, Master, Doctorate, or Post-Doc. Heck, you can find entire websites devoted to wallowing in thesis misery. On one hand I get it, but on the other hand, even if we assume that this post-doc thesis will be 4x as bad as my undergraduate thesis (no real basis for that, 4x just sounds fun) it still won’t be as bad as cutting up scrap metal with a blow torch in the middle of a parking lot in high-humidity, August, 90s heat. While cutting up scrap metal had its fun factor, a Midwestern heatwave/humidity bomb in August generated one of those “Yep, I don’t like this” moments in my life that I haven’t forgotten. Therefore, I probably won’t talk much about my thesis, sort of like I haven’t really spoken a whole lot about my program in general, at least in comparison to earlier academic endeavors. Yes, I’m going to mention it from time to time, but I’ll leave the thesis to the thesis and Dinosaur Bear to Dinosaur bear. This post is more of a historical “checkpoint” as to when I roughly started the thesis and which also serves as a rudimentary overview of what the thesis will entail.

So on that note, let’s talk about something more exciting!

One thing that I don’t think I mentioned on the blog between the new year festivities and Meem’s visit was Pigsten’s birthday! Yes, little ole’ Pigsten (who was “born” in New Mexico) turned 2. We celebrated with a plate of some of his favorite foods and all of his “window” friends came down to enjoy it with us.

We also let him have an entire rum-filled chocolate to himself, which he thoroughly enjoyed.

If you were curious where the chocolate came from, it was from a giant (110 piece) variety box that SB got from her work for Christmas.

This is the bottom layer, there was an identical layer above that one that we had to work through first.

That sucker lasted us for awhile, heck even Meem got to sample some of them.

Now, this is probably a good point to introduce Pigsten’s new friend, Broli!

Broli is a hatchling Brachiosaurus who came to live with us in December as part of a gift-package from one of the Boys’ friends in the United States! As Broli is super-tiny, Pigsten acts as his chauffeur to the world – plus I think Pigsten likes to have someone even smaller than him around! In fact Pigsten and Broli spend a lot of their time keeping an eye on Pigsten’s construction site, which continues to progress at variable speeds.

While it’s certainly come a long way from the big dirt pit that greeted us when we moved here, it’s not changed quite as much as you might think. The latest change involves the addition of a third, larger, crane in the pit nearest to us (there are two).

They’ve also started to do some foundational work.

The crew has definitely increased in size over the past couple of weeks, and while they still aren’t moving what I’d call “fast” the pace has definitely increased.

They also seem to have busted out multiple shifts, as it’s not uncommon for them to be there from ~7am to ~8pm on weekdays, with smaller shifts on weekends.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ll probably do a dedicated construction site post sometime closer to when we leave. It’s been a pretty big part of our existence here, from the hours of entertainment in the first bit when we had no internet, to enjoying our neighbors QQ hardcore about the jack-hammering, to karma catching up with us and the site shining multiple 7 trillion candlewatt lights into our apartment 24/7 (to the point we had to buy more curtains), to just trying to guess what is going to happen next. It’s also interesting to watch them work in some of the really crappy weather, or, as Lucretious put it:

“Pleasant it is, when over a great sea the winds trouble the waters, to gaze from shore upon another’s great tribulation: not because any man’s troubles are a delectable joy, but because to perceive from what ills you are free yourself is pleasant.”

Speaking of weather, it’s been really weird lately. We are in this cycle of “really cold and snow” and “less cold and rain,” and each comes with a dabble or two of gale force winds. I’d say we’ve been leaning towards the snow side of things lately.. as made evident by this photo from earlier in the week showing some whiteout conditions.

But what happens is that the snow falls, then it gets compacted due to foot traffic, then we get just barely above freezing, then it freezes and more snow falls. The result is a several-inch thick layer of ice over everything. I remember this happening in the Midwest, but never to this extent.

On the flip side, as least the snow is pretty before it turns to ice.

I took this photo while walking home one night, it’s a good shoot of what our neighborhood looks like.

Now, to segue from one snow topic to the next, I recently realized something that might seem really basic to you – but it took me months to fully understand.

As mentioned, we get a lot of snow and rain – really more snow and/or rain than sun. But in my near-daily outings, I noticed that there are some areas that simply never have snow or ice on them. Here’s a good example.

Now, that’s from a period without much snow, but you can clearly see what I am talking about on the sidewalk. The thing is, there are areas like that all over the place (though not as many as a pedestrian would like). At first I thought that people were simply clearing them, though as the weeks wore on I came to notice that the areas didn’t bear any signs of being cleared. Further, if they were being cleared, these people were clearing them at like 3am – every single day. So from there I just presumed that they were treated with some chemical, but then I remember that unlike the U.S. where we’d happily dump nuclear waste on the snow if we could, Iceland isn’t so keen on chemicals (heck they don’t even really use salt – which as “green” as that may be, generates some real pain in the ass walking routes). Plus, the way the clearings appeared didn’t really look like any sort of chemical had been applied. I’ve seen how melting chemicals look (as Boston LOVED their salt and chemicals DEAR GOD – R.I.P. Entryway Floor), and these areas bore zero signs of any application.

Then, one fine day, it finally hit me. Geothermal heating. Yep, you may have thought of that first thing, but for some reason I did not. It’s actually really obvious. The buildings have geothermal infrastructure running to them already, so you just build off that and you can “heat” entire areas. This explained why the area immediately around the university was almost always perfect, but less than one block away you needed ice skates to get anywhere.

Here’s a really good example of it in action.

You can clearly see where the pipes are running. It’s really awesome, and kind of embarrassing that it took me so long to figure it out, especially when our own building has it in a few areas – though notably not in the interior (yet exposed) hallways for some reason.

However, I grew up in an area with zero geothermal utilization, so using the flames of hell itself to remove snow are not something I generally think of. So there’s a cool “The More You Know!” moment for you. In Iceland the devastating friction of two entire continents grinding against one another as the magma core of the Earth bubbles to the surface in the drift between them is harnessed so you don’t slip and die on the stairs. Science!

Sadly one cannot always utilize geothermal heat, so one tends to hide inside the geothermal-warmed building on the nasty days. The plus side to all that inside time is that Pigsten and I have really nailed our oat-pancake recipe.

Seen here with some delicious rhubarb (“Rabarber”) jam.

It also leaves plenty of time to sample the nectar of the hops – beer.

Speaking of beer, I’ve really been branching out lately. One of the many awesome things Meem did while here was buy me a lot of beer. Sadly I don’t get much beer here (aside from near-beers) due to cost, which makes Taco sad. However, Meem bought me quite a few, then SB picked me up a few the week after Meem left, so I’m decently well stoked on brewskies right now. I’ve implemented a “ration” system where I space out my “real” beers with “near-beer” mixed in to make the good stuff last longer. Such is the life of poor folk in one of the world’s most expensive countries. 😀

However, one key element of the ration system is “reward” beers. The most recent reward beer was from completing my second group project in two weeks. If you’ve read this blog for awhile, you’ll know that f*cking loathe collegiate group projects and can soapbox for thousands of words about how I don’t feel like they replicate real life (job) group work in my experience, at all. I also dislike the fact that this program even requires them – and I’m only half done with them for this semester, but enough about that. I completed the one last week and rewarded myself with this funky beer.

I mostly bought it because I thought the bottle was cool, but it was an intriguing fruit beer with lots of fruit flavors I wasn’t expecting. It was also vibrant red, probably the reddest beer I’ve ever seen. Once I completed it I added it to the “beer stand” which is a little area where I keep beer bottles and cans before recycling them (excluding near-beers, they go straight into the recycling bag as they aren’t nearly as cool).

As you can see here, I’ve put a good dent in the supply January brought in, but I still have more than seen here to go (including one physically-massive special beer to be addressed in the future!).

But yes, that’s about all I have to share for now. Nothing too exciting, but just enough that I felt like writing a post about it. Now I’ve got to get back to editing a (non-thesis) paper I am working on. I think I might enjoy a few of my chocolate-covered-salt-licorice bites that I picked up from Bónus the other day.

If you think chocolate covered “black” licorice sounds weird, then you should probably read this post because you have no idea just how weird it actually is. However, despite some initial reservations, I think I’m actually starting to enjoy the ammonium-filled “lakkrís” that Iceland is so obsessed with.

There’s probably going to be a few week gap until the next post, but it should be an exciting one when it comes! 🙂

Look at me, all sliding into the final hours of 2017 with one last post. Don’t get too excited, despite the name this isn’t going to be any cool introspective recap of 2017. That can be found by reading all of 2017’s posts (all 21 of them). 😛

Instead I’m just going to talk about two primary things. First – Part 1, what I’ve been up to, and second – Part 2, some thoughts on school now that the first semester is in the books. So let’s get started with Part 1!

First off, if you’re wondering what the weather has been like lately, well, mostly crap to be honest. 😀

A startlingly accurate depiction of recent walking conditions here on the coast.

A lot of that has been due to the wind (see above, that’s a photo from Reykjavík), but there’s also just the cold in general, plus the lack of daylight. But, life must go on, so despite the changed conditions I still get up and around for the gym in the mornings.

In case you were wondering, yes that’s the gym I go to. It’s pretty small (and old), but its only a 6 minute walk from me and since it’s through the university it’s actually quite affordable for Iceland.

Also, despite what it might look like, those photos were taken in the morning, not at night. As you can see from the clock on the wall if you are eagle-eyed, it’s 7:15 – meaning that “sunlight” is still over 4 hours away at that point. I put sunlight in scare quotes because the sun doesn’t really come “up” it just sort of stays below the horizon and moves sideways. Indeed, most mornings in the apartment look like this..

..until we are long out the door. It’s grand. It also, on the flip side, gets dark very, very early. In fact I’d say there is far more moon than sun these days.

But, the positive aspect of that is that since sunrise is at like 11:30am, you are always up to see the good ones!

It doesn’t always mean you can fully enjoy them though, for instance this nice sunrise was taken right before a final exam, so I was a bit distracted – though not so much that I didn’t stop to take a photo of it!

Of course the bad news is that by the time the sun “rises” it’s already starting to set. For instance, this next photo is basically right after sunrise, yet the sun is already going down over Pigsten’s construction site.

Speaking of his construction site, boy it’s changed a lot! For one, they are now done with what I’ll call Stage 1 of the pit nearest to us.

They are simultaneously working on two buildings, and it’s taken them since we’ve moved here to finalize the earthworks. The contractors have also changed over, and now they’ve installed barricades all around the pit. Which I guess makes sense since the wind kept pwning the chain-link fence.

Pigsten rarely lets any work happen without his oversight.

Pigsten also got a new friend and helper! Broli (the baby Brachiosaurus) came with a card and some treats from one of the boys’ friends in the United States!

Broli and Pigsten are busy bodies and make sure everything is done right!

The plant buddies are also there for assistance, as they have since moved up into the bedroom window ledge to maximize their exposure to our limited sunlight.

Speaking of “buddies” awhile back I found a visitor on the way out in the morning.

Yes, a cat (or “rat” as Tristen calls them) was waiting for me on the stairs. An enemy deep in King Tristen’s domain. I don’t think it was the dreaded Yule Cat, as this was a bit too early for it, plus this cat was especially non-ferocious. Or maybe that was just a guise? Tristen always says there are two things you don’t trust: cats and raptors. Either way, it followed me around but clearly did not want to go outside into the cold.

Can’t say I blame it – though when I got back someone had shooed it outside (probably Tristen). Speaking of the Yule Cat, the boys started reading their Yule Lad book just as the first Yule Lad came into town.

They diligently kept up with the book as the days progressed, even getting treats from each Yule Lad. For instance one left them a Christmas candle that they then used while reading about the next Yule Lad!

They also left the Yule Lads plenty of treats to entice them, such as some yummy Laufabrauð.

Or in one case an entire tub of Skyr. Yep. In my boot.

But, in addition to all the Yule Lad fun we had to do some much more mundane things, such prepare for an take final exams. I’ll discuss the exams more in a bit, but they were definitely a less-than-fun part of December.

However, as SB and I have a long history of doing, we curtailed the exam-time woes with lots of delicious noms, such as gingerbread-cinnamon-roll-bites and coffee!

We’ve branched out quiet a bit with our coffee over the holiday season, from local roasters..

..to more commercial “Christmas Blends.”

But that’s not all, as if it is any surprise I’ve also being trying lots of Christmas beers (Jólabjór)!

There’s quite a variety of them, from both microbreweries to macrobreweries.

In total I am set to try 10 or so of the Christmas beers, I’ll post a photo of them all in a later post.

We’ve also tried the ubiquitous Malt og Appelsín (Jólabland), which you know, actually turned out to be pretty good. I really, really did not think I would like it, but it is something I’d certainly drink again. Now, mind you, it’s not something I’d drink a lot of, but as a seasonal thing, definitely (it also apparently comes back around during Easter, just under a different name).

It’s hard to understate just how prolific the Christmas drinks are, they are not only widely available, but they are numerous in variety. Heck, some of them even have their own Christmas decorations!

On the whole I’d say the stores are much less plastic and gaudy here insofar as Christmas goes. Yet, don’t mistake that for a lack of stuff – there is plenty of that, from the Jólabókaflóð, to all the delicious food (and booze), to metric tons worth of lakkrís – there is plenty of holiday to be had. There was also a massive surge of coloring books, complete with… toothpaste. Yes, toothpaste.

And oh yeah, that’s right next to the frozen meat, in case you were wondering.

But, we passed on the toothpaste accented coloring books and instead opted for cookies. Oh lawds, so many kinds of cookies. One really interesting variety was these delicacies:

I don’t remember what they were called in Icelandic, but they tasted EXACTLY like Oreos, except with magical sparkles and a star shape. I’m talking, these were more like Oreos than any non-Oreo (even fake Oreo wannabes) I’ve ever had. They were nummy.

We’ve also had lots of gingerbread stuff (in addition to the rolls above), including gingerbread cake and classic gingerbread cookies, such as the free ones from Háskólabúðin!

Yes, they have a coffee bean filled counter, it’s pretty neat I think.

Another fun thing is that we received our first care package. Yay!

I mean, sure it took 1 day short of an entire month to arrive, and Tollstjóri (customs) took some stuff out of it due to their really opaque (and seemingly ever-changing) rules, but it did arrive! Thanks Meem!

Yes, between the weather, the Yule Lads, and the pressies, the holidays were definitely in the air. The city has definitely shifted into the season as well.

It’s kinda hard to see, since my old phone’s camera is pretty abhorrent absent 1 octillion candle-watt conditions, but Perlan has acquired new red accenting. In fact, it even changes between red and green! It’s really cool. Here is another shot, complete with Pigsten’s construction site in action. This was probably around 5pm or so.

In addition to red and green, they even had Perlan lit up like the Icelandic Flag for a bit, in addition to other random patterns consisting of white, blue, green, and red. Right now it’s all lit up red, except for one light which is blue and which cycles between that and white.

Other fun additions include wreathes around Tjörnin, which I’ve mentioned before but are always pretty.

Beyond decorations, the environment itself feels very holiday-like, or perhaps more accurately I could just say it feels extremely cold. As in, the geothermal-heat-of-the-earth-itself-creates-steam-cold.

But, not a whole lot you can do about that besides bundle up, and I really do mean bundle up. I don’t remember the last time my layers didn’t have layers. 🙂

Besides, the holidays require holiday shopping, and in Iceland online shopping really isn’t a thing, so we’ve braved the conditions on several occasions to go to some non-standard stores. One trip took us back down to the harbor area. There were a couple of vessels there which I thought was part of Iceland’s Coast Guard (which commands a whopping armada of 4 ships), but I found out they were actually ships from the Royal Danish Navy.

I’m not sure about the shift on the left (as pictured), but the ship on the right is the HDMS Hvidbjoernen (F360).

We also did some Christmas-pressie shopping on Laugavegur, where one shop had a nice side-by-side of Iceland’s two most famous birds.

I’ll leave it to you to guess which is which. 😛

Our shopping also allowed us to experience a bit of the pre-holiday festivities, such as this skating rink we stumbled upon.

The whole of downtown has a very nice Christmas vibe to it.

Even the university itself, which is generally pretty brutalist, has gotten into the holiday spirit.

As have SB and I of course! This has been a very different holiday season, in that we aren’t going to see family at for the first time ever – a step further from last year where we had to leave before New Year’s. I’d say we weren’t going “home” but I’ve come to realize that home is a very transient thing for me, so it’s easier to say that we just stayed here. Of course we weren’t actually here for Christmas, but that’s for another post. 🙂

Despite being away from family and elsewhere over Christmas, we’ve been keeping in the holiday spirit now that we are back in Iceland. One really cool (literally and figuratively) thing we did just a couple of days ago was walk on Tjörnin for the first time. In fact, we’re pretty sure it was our first time walking over a frozen lake in each of our lives (sans Valentino of course).

Taco weighing his desire to keep walking against his uncertainty about the large cracks in the ice (spoiler: he kept walking).

The ice was crazy thick. It’s hard to tell from the photo because you’ve lost the three dimensional aspects of it, but if you look closely at the crack running vertically(ish) in this photo you can see how deep the ice is. My guess was that the ice was a solid 8+ inches thick, if not more. It made zero noise while walking on it, and I legitimately believe you could have driven across the lake in a car.

We’ve also been taking in a lot of fireworks over the past several days. In fact, I dare say the Icelanders are more obsessed with fireworks around New Year’s than even the Murkans. It’s not unusual to have 10-15 spontaneous firework displays (in random spots) starting anywhere from like 2pm until late.

Another crappy phone photo, featuring a firework above Perlan and a glare that kind of makes it seem like we have two moons. Iceland isn’t that alien.

While some are just a few big’uns, others are a bonafide several minute-long bonanza. All this starting days before New Year’s – it’s been going since at least the 28th (when we got back from our Christmas trip).

But, that kind of brings us up to the present! New Year’s Eve, woo! Which I suppose means it’s time to segue into Part 2 of the post: school.

If you’ve followed along since August or so you’ll have noticed that I didn’t really talk much about school. I discussed it a bit in this post (which I recommend reading as background to this next section, at least the school portion) but outside of that I’ve been a bit mum about it, especially in contrast to my incessant whining while at HLS. A lot of that has to do with the reasons mentioned in that post – school just isn’t a huge part of my life here. I mean, yes, it is, but it’s not a big part of my ideological reasoning for being here, nor is a big part of my personal journey right now. So, when I sit down to blog, I’d rather talk about other things, such as the Westfjords. This is not to say that school doesn’t eat a lot of my time, oh it does. Indeed, it kind of annoys me with the amount of time that it requires for things that I really couldn’t care less about.

Now that I’ve got a semester behind me, I have to say that holistically I’m not a big fan of my program. A big, big part of that is that I just feel like it’s so disorganized towards international students. Though in fairness, Iceland as whole doesn’t seem to care much for people being anything other than a short-term tourist. I’m not getting into a discussion of that, but my point is that there is very, very little assistance to be found for people who are not Icelandic or who are not from the EEA (not to be confused with the EU, which Iceland wants no part of). As a result, I frequently find myself having to fight tooth and nail just to accomplish very basic administrative tasks. This of course is compounded by the very “Meh, meeeeeeeeeh, maybe at some point” culture that is pervasive here. That would be great if they weren’t also paradoxically obsessed with really early deadlines for ferners’. The result is that you often have little time to do something and no avenue for help in doing it, either because they outright don’t know (the rules are so complex that even Icelanders don’t understand them), or they don’t care enough due to the aforementioned meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeh. It’s really pretty awesome, in the smash your face into a concrete block sort of a way.

The catalyst of this disorganization is the fact that my program is not the length I thought it was. I’m not going to type the entire story here, but they REALLY need to work on how they describe the program in the English language (which should be a priority, since the program is one of their few ones in English), because as it stands, they are grossly misrepresenting the timeline (I’m talking upwards of 6 months misrepresentation). I really don’t think it’s intentional, and I’ve brought this to their attention, but I also legitimately think they just don’t care. Not out of malice, but just because, well, peeps are different here, lol. My high strung, gotta be on the move, obese Amerifat DNA doesn’t mesh well with it. Though in my defense it wouldn’t as much of an issue if they didn’t hold us to oddly strict standards in spite of themselves.

So, despite the fact that I was able to somewhat fix the timeline issue (though I’m still about 2-3 months out of whack), that got me off on the wrong foot. Then I found out that despite being an ultra-specialized post-doc program, the majority of my classes are just bull-crap I don’t care about. For instance, over the course of the program I will take 10 classes (it’s mostly a research program, but I still have to take classes). I came here for environmental law – in a life that now seems quiet distant to me I’m actually a barred lawyer person – and I like environmental law. Thus, post-doc. However, and this is so dumb it’s just sad, of those 10 classes only 4, yes 4 out of 10, are strictly environmental law. There is one that you could argue is in the realm of environmental law, but even if you are generous and add that one in, that’s only 5 out of 10 classes focused on environmental law. Yes, an environmental law post-doc that is only FIFTY PERCENT environmental law, and that’s being generous. W.T.F. I did not come here to retake some fluffy pants Human Rights course I had 3 years ago in 1L, I came here to take extremely-high-level environmental law courses, and on that front, I got one, one single course, that I’d call “high level” environmental law.

Then, to make matters even worse, the classes like “Public International Law” and “International Economic Law,” are just general law classes, meaning that there are people in them who don’t even have a Masters yet (I could write an entire post about why I don’t think the two legal education systems [U.S. v. European] mesh well and why that’s negatively impacting my experience, but those are unnecessary details for this post – just know that I’m objectively more educated than my classmates – NOTE: I said more educated, not more intelligent 🙂 ). And while I’m far from a pretentious academic, the result is that you get a course aimed a people who have far less legal education than I do – and while I’m definitely no legal guru, and always appreciate learning more, it also means that the classes get boring as heck. There’s also the fact that a lot of the students are extremely unengaged. Or, in the instance of the Icelandic students, they just don’t show up to class – ever (and the exam, some of them just skip that too). Now, I’m not one to talk about being unengaged, that’s sort of defined me in the classroom environment for a few years now (see one of my many posts about what I actually like doing in the lawls – hint: it’s not sitting in a classroom). But the fact of the matter is that the students in my program, which is very small, are mixed into the general body of students as opposed to having their own schtick. Indeed, on many levels the super small size of my program seems to be more of a hindrance than a benefit, but there isn’t much I can do about that. All I can really do is enjoy the sporadic things that are more focused on the students at my level, though the director of the program cancelled half of those things last semester. Yep, dat meh.

However, while I’ve made it pretty clear that I’m not overly enthused about my classes (or the majority of my professors), I did have one professor who I actually liked – and that professor is now going to be my primary thesis advisor. So that’s pretty cool. The additional good news on that front is that despite it taking 1.5 months to get a single page completed (yes one page), my thesis topic has also supposedly been approved. I say supposedly because nothing is ever certain here. So that’s a big relief. Really my thesis is the only thing about this entire affair that still really excites me. In a lot of ways I think this program should just be the thesis, with none of the fluff classes, but (fortunately as some would say) I have no say in the matter.

The director of my program has toys in their office, I like that much. 🙂

“Yes, that’s nice” you say, “but what about your grades!” I hear you. After all, our entire existence is defined by grades amirite? Dere is nufin but gradez! Yes, because establishing someone’s worth based on a small slice of time is such a good system. But it is what it is, and after all that bitching you might expect me to say I got bad gradez, and then you’ll laugh “ha ha, look out how bitter he is!” Nah my grades are fine. I scored all “First Class” which I still don’t fully understand, but I’ve been told it means I got all As. Basically the system at the University of Iceland is thus:

I have no idea how big that will be, but you get the idea. You don’t want to be red. You want to be as far away from red as possible. I also don’t think they use a forced curve, or if they do it is NO WHERE near as severe as HLS’s. I’m quite far from red, but not in the “With Distinction” (A+) tier, and I have no goal (or motivation) to get there. I’m safely within in the realm of “First Class” – much closer to A+ than to B – and that’s more than good enough for me. But, though I generally care very little for gradez, one aspect of how I got muh gradez is worth discussing. The oral exam.

Yes, like Murka’, IDIOTIC group projects, pointless papers, and time-wasting readings abound here in Icelandia. But one thing that I’ve found in the lawls realm is that the oral exam is favored over the written exam, and now that I’d taken several of these oral exams I feel like I can comfortably comment on them. Basically they are a good deal easier than the written exams I took at HLS (though keep in mean this doesn’t mean they are “easy,” just “easier”). I don’t know if that is a format thing, or a institutional thing (my guess is more on the latter, honestly). Now, in order to explain why I think they are easier, I need to explain the format – and since self depredation is always fun, I’ll just go ahead and say that I did not “ace” any of my exams (at least not in the traditional usage of the word “ace” meaning to “pwn” – though I did get As).

First, it’s important to note that the exams are scheduled early in the day (not early in the semester, you only learn your time less than a week in advance, meh), so in the fall semester at least you are dealing with the tired (thanks again neighbors for making noise until 3am), the dark, and the cold. This photo isn’t so dark, but it does capture the cold.

Yes that’s actually part of campus. I like it.

So, while you are tired and it’s dark and cold, you get to engage in a legal conversation where anywhere from 2 to 5 people are asking you questions. That’s the essential format of the oral exam. You talk, rather than write. Makes sense I suppose! It’s also worth noting, if it wasn’t obvious, but that you are alone. You don’t take the exam as a class, it’s one-by-one. Now, if the thought of being randomly asked questions from an entire semester’s worth of material and being expected to respond in real time makes you nervous, then perhaps being a lawyer isn’t the best field for you. I kid, but really instantaneous information recall is half the job in my experience. The good news for ye’ of timid presence, is that it’s not entirely random. Here’s why. When entering the judgment room, you pull a question out of a bowl (literally in some cases) and then you have anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes to prepare your answer to that question. During those 5 to 15 minutes, you can access ALL your notes (so long as they are printed, because f*ck trees amirite????). You can’t use your already-made notes in the exam, but you can use the notes you took from your notes during that 5 to 15 minute window (it makes sense just think about it for a second). This is why I don’t think the format is especially difficult. Unlike a written exam where you have between 3 and 12 hours and are expected to provide the most minuscule and precise of details (as well as discuss 8000 different applications of 12000 different rules), here you have somewhere around 10-15 minutes of discussion, and that’s it. As such, the expectations for microscopic detail aren’t as high.

So, here’s what I did, and it worked well. I just made an outline like I normally would. These outlines were generally quite large (I’m talking hundreds of pages in some cases) because a semester of law is a shit-ton of information. However, you then cabbage them down and use some lolzy formatting to get that outline down to less than 30 pages. You then make a table of contents for the outline, with large thematic areas divided into more specific sub-topics. Then you’re done. See, unlike the bulk of my classmates who seemed extremely stressed out, I didn’t even try to memorize any of that shit. Learning 350 pages of material, only to be asked about something which comprises 5 pages seemed like a massive waste of my time. Couple that with the fact that 60% of my classes are about crap I don’t care about, and yeah, you get the picture. In fact, outside of making the outline, I didn’t study for any of my exams. SB can vouch for this, people FUH-REAK out about studying for exams here (and by here I don’t just mean the Icelanders, I mean all the European students). Yet I didn’t study at all aside from the process of making/formatting the outline – and also for the record I never bought any of my textbooks and thus did none of the reading for the entire semester either.

If you’re getting tired of what might seem like gloating, bear with me. This isn’t leading up to an “I so smart” epiphany. I’m just a proponent of studying smart, not hard. So, here’s what I did. I used my categorized outline, and when I got the question, I used my 5 to 15 minutes to basically regurgitate that small section of the outline onto the page of notes I was allowed to bring into the exam – and, when the additional questions came, they were invariably also from that same section. So, if it was dealing with Directive 2000/60/EC, I’d know that the specific questions were going to be something like explaining the effects of a major Article of the directive, in that case probably Article 14, which effectively assimilated the public access requirements of the Aarhus Convention. That might sound obtuse without any topical knowledge, but once you’re familiar with the area and have your handy-dandy micro-outline, it’s not unexpected or particularly challenging. This is in contrast to the extremely long written exam, where even 12 hours isn’t enough time to go from “no studying” to “good grade” within the confines of the test.

The big caveat here is that you have to be very comfortable with the oral exam format, that is, real time legal conversations where you are outnumbered and where you truly have no idea what base question you’re going to get until you pull it out of the proverbial/literal hat. I’m fortunate in that such interactions don’t bother me, and that’s probably the only area of the entire process where I’d risk saying I’m above average. The fact that I was one of the top, or near the top grades in each of my classes had nothing to do with knowledge or devotion (of which I’d say I have less than most than my classmates), but instead to what I’d call a capitalizing “study” process and the fact that Ivory Tower Academics and fancy board-room tables don’t intimate me in the least. There’s also the fact that I could score 0.0000001 point above failing in all my classes and it would legitimately make no difference since my J.D. is my core degree anyway.

Thus, I’d say most of the difficulty in the format comes from the fact that you can’t prepare for a specific question, and that you need to be ok with verbal exchanges (that your grade depends on, and the exams are normally 50% of the grade – which is about 50% less than what I am used to, lol). The funny thing here, is that “cheating” is rampant. You might have already thought about the glaring issue, but if not, I’ll explain. As I mentioned, the exam takes place one-by-one, they can’t really drill a whole class at once, so there is a time-table, and you go in the judgement room one at a time, in set order. See the issue? While the questions are random to the individual, the questions are NOT infinite. In fact, some classes have as few as 4-5 questions – though others have as many as 20 (depending on the professor, obviously the more questions, the more complicated grading is for them). Now, you only get to see one question, but since that one question becomes the basis for your entire discussion, you don’t forget it, despite having to immediately return the question to the pile. So, naturally, as soon as you are done and leave the room, you either willing or unwillingly converse with your fellow students who have yet to take the exam, and tell them the question. I saw unwillingly because the culture is to wait right outside the exam room and relentlessly and somewhat aggressively pester the student who is leaving the room (regardless of how upset they might be) even if you never spoke to them outside of that moment. Yes, the culture is practically built around this kind of “cheating” – so much so that to not divulge your question is seen as being an asshole. I can safely say that I didn’t ask anyone about their question, because I didn’t care enough – and also didn’t want to you know, actually study, however I did tell people about my question, also because I didn’t care enough. However, if you were of the type that didn’t want to break the rules, or just didn’t want to help people get a better grade, then you’d have some serious peer pressure to deal with. The end result, is that as the day goes on, people who have yet to take the exam have built up a library of the questions, and if there are only 4-5 questions, this means that they’ve effectively seen the exam in advance.

But it doesn’t stop there. Ever industrious, the students will divide up the questions, and draft answers to the potential questions, and then copy them for themselves. Thus, a pool of 10 students might be able to generate 10 full answers, and then they just trade them. Of course this naturally means that the people early in the day have a much harder exam than the people latter in the day who may have “cheated” their way to a 50% chance at answering the question using materials they didn’t even make. Of course, I use scare quotes around “cheating” because even if you do use crowd-sourcing to obtain an answer to a question you end up getting, you’re left with an answer that isn’t your own and the hope that your attempts to memorize an entire textbook (or textbooks) are enough to answer the secondary questions, which are likely to be generated in real time. Still, the fact is that this behavior is extremely rampant, and I’d surmise causes a lot of people to pass where they would have otherwise probably failed. The cheating in and of itself doesn’t really bother me, it’s the fact that the first students are realistically being tested at a far different level than the later students, and that the professors – who are aware this goes on, or are stupid (not ignorant, stupid) – don’t seem to care. That is what bothers me. If everyone could, if they wished, cheat at the same level, then I really don’t care – but this cheating is objectively slanted towards groups later in the day.

But in the end I still did better than most, and I didn’t cheat, or read the books, or really study, I just made a really organized table of contents and pasted that on the front of a 30 page, double-sided, 8 point font, .01 margins, legal monstrosity. Yay autismz. 😀

Anyways, that’s my thoughts on school. It’s weird, and while I’m not a big fan of my program as a whole, I am looking forward to the thesis, which will be entirely my own and on a topic I am very much interested in. Unfortunately I’m going to be quite pressed for time on it (due to the aforementioned timeline snafu), but I’m still excited to give the whole thesis thing a second go, though this one is going to be 2.5 times as long as my first one and is going to be published (and thus subjected to far more scrutiny). But I’m still excited in my good ole’ masochistic way – and, lest it seem otherwise, I have no regrets about where I’m at or what I’m doing, even if the road has been much rockier than expected.

If you thought this post featured a little bit too much complaining or bragging about school, have no fear, I’ll probably go right back to not talking very much about it for awhile. 🙂

With that, I should probably wrap this up. I had originally just wanted to just talk about school, but then I decided to add in some other things, and now look at that, this post is over 5700 words. I am nothing if not hopelessly verbose. I promise I can actually be concise when I need to be! Apparently that writing style just doesn’t crop up in my blogging, it, after all, it is mah’ hot blog, I do wut I wahnt!

If it wasn’t obvious, this will be the final post of 2017 for Dinosaur Bear. I hope you’ve enjoyed another year worth of my rambling – and boy what a year it has been. I already have another post conceptualized, though I’m not sure when I’ll get around to writing it. In the meantime, I hope you all had a Merry Christmas (or various holiday of your choosing) and that you have a Wonderful New Year.

Here’s Uglan (the mascot of Háskóli Íslands), with a Holiday (Christmas + New Year’s) send-off!

Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens~Gimli (J.R.R. Tolkien)0000000000

Greetings and welcome to Dinosaur Bear!

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As promised I’ve decided to write a post about the more mundane and slightly less exciting aspects of living in “The Land of Fire and Ice.” The goal of this post isn’t to give an in-depth look at Icelandic culture or lifestyle. Heck, it’s not even really to provide a day-in-and-day-out account of being a ferner’ here. There are plenty of travel blogs that can do such a thing far more adeptly than I can. Instead I’m just going to ramble about a few things that we’ve been doing and encountered since moving here 3 months ago. Like anything in life there is some good, some bad, and some downright weird. Unlike a lot of my posts which have at least a semblance of a narrative, this time I’m just going to type things as I think of them (which is itself a result of which pictures I chose). So not everything here is chronological, nor does one thing necessary flow conceptually to the other. However I’ll try to keep my rambling structured to some extent! 🙂

So what happened once we got settled? Well, a lot. Not the least of which I found out that I passed the bar, and we also went on our first in-country trip. However, a lot of “easier to miss” things also happened. We had to do things like find out where a grocery store was, and once there, figure out what milk was. You’d think that would be easy but we ended up with an entire jug of yogurt (true story). We also found out really quickly that just because you recognize a brand, does not mean that that brand is going to be what you expect it to be. Case in point, a lot of the cereal is way different.0000000000

Mmm, delicious rugs with fras.

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Sure we’d both lived abroad before, but that time around we were part of a program (especially SB) so there was a bit of hand-holding involved. This was a full-fledged plop down into a country of which you don’t even know how to say “Hello.” The result is that things have been interesting (in both good and bad ways). For instance I once opened what I thought was a stall in the restroom to find a mini-kids bathroom all self-contained inside of the stall.0000000000

So when I say that we often don’t know what is going to be behind the next door, I mean that literally. As in, we can’t even read anything but the most basic of signs. I once also went into what I thought was a computer lab, only to realize I’d stumbled into the 9th circle of hell and it was a lab full of Macs. I still have PTSD.

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However, the good news is that SB is actually learning a bit of Icelandic. Partially because of her job at a preschool and partially because she is taking a basic Icelandic course through the university. I, however, am making less strides as my work doesn’t expose me to Icelandic, nor am I taking a class in it. I’m getting some of it just from constant exposure, but I wouldn’t really say that I’m actively learning it, as it’s more of a passive absorption. The last remnants of my German help some, but sometimes they cause more problems than they solve because it’s FAR from a 1:1 linguistic comparison.

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Still, all the confusion from the language aside, life is fairly normal. At least as normal as life can be when you live right across the street from an airport and a construction site.

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The construction site actually doesn’t bother us. In fact I’m probably going to make a post just about the construction site at some point in the future. However, in the meantime don’t be surprised if it sneaks into posts semi-frequently. It is a fairly big part of our existence after all. We’ve named all the workers and the machines and created an entire story, it helps deal with the jackhammers starting at 7:55 am.

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Of course “life as normal” also means that we can’t just enjoy living in Iceland and being students. Lots of a boring life stuff still has to happen. For instance, shortly after moving here my computer just shut off one night. Just, boom, dead. This is the same computer that I’d just paid $600 between shipping and customs for – a 4 year old computer no less (I later found out that the computer wasn’t supposed to have customs paid on it, but of course they didn’t tell me that). Anyways, I’m decent with computers and I knew enough to know this wasn’t something minor. So the tinkering began.

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After a few hours of poking, prodding, and dismantling I came to the conclusion that it was either the power supply (PSU) or the graphics card (GPU). Naturally, being in Iceland meant that regardless of which one it was, I was going to pay about 50-80% more than I would have if the same part had broken before I moved. That said, the GPU would be much easier to replace than the PSU because my particular computer uses a server-rack style PSU, whereas the GPU is just a standard make.

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So the first thing to come out for testing was the PSU.

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And from there we next went to the GPU for testing.0000000000

The good news is that it ended up being the GPU that had bit the dust. This was the first time ever I’d had a GPU die on me – wonderful. So I went about figuring out how to get a new one, and despite my best efforts I ultimately decided that I’d just need to buy one in a brick-and-mortar store here to get the best price (due to customs + shipping). However, I soon found that there were no stores within walking distance that carried computer hardware. Fortunately, I was able to use the free shuttle to Smáralind (mall) which leaves from City Hall to get within about 10 minutes walking distance of a computer hardware store. I guess the one lucky thing was that it happened before the shuttle stopped running for the season. So, thanks to a bit of leeching from the mall shuttle I was able to acquire a new GPU.

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Of course I paid over $100 more for it than I would have even in the more expensive stores in the U.S., but in my life when it comes to my desktop there are two options 1) I have my Desktop 2) I end up on the FBI’s (or I guess Lögregla’s these days) most wanted list.

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Installing the GPU was a bit of a chore since I have what is called a “small form factor” (SFF) case. But I managed without breaking anything.0000000000

Now, life being life, that wasn’t the only expensive thing that broke. As I mentioned before our camera lens also decided to break at some point. We had purchased the additional coverage when we bought it, but because we are abroad it turned into a massive shit-show to get them to honor the warranty. The end result is that we had to pay $50 to get someone to say “Yep, it’s broke.” Then pay $30 to send it to the warranty people so they could say “Yep, it’s broke.”

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Happy Icelandic boxes for sad broken camera lenses and other goodies.

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All for them to not replace it anyways. In the end we managed to recover about 1/2 of what we paid for the lens, which does us little good here since the same lens costs literally 2.5x as much in Iceland. We also are down a suitcase, because one of them got damaged too – oh and they didn’t replace that either.

Back to the living situation. Which is to say, back to the construction yard.

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And early morning (and late night) jack-hammering. Or as better reference of what morning currently looks like:

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That is about 8:30am, for reference.

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Also, and by late night I do mean late-night.0000000000

Ok so that photo was actually at like 6 o’clock, but more about the ENCROACHING DARKNASS in a bit. Besides, Pigsten might get angry at me if I discuss his “secret” construction site too much just yet.

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So living, yeah, it’s living! The boys are still as crazy as ever.

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Actually Valentino is a little more crazy than usual. We think it’s the newfound proximity to the Arctic Circle that is causing him to go a bit feral. Polar Bears can be dangerous yo’.

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We also live in a giant concrete bunker. No seriously, a lot of the buildings here look like they were built to withstand being shelled. While Iceland hasn’t been subjected to much in the way of shelling (outside of Red Storm Rising, anyways) it gets absolutely shitter-blasted by the more natural elements. As such, a lot of the buildings look like ass but when your existence consists of 365 days of wind blowing things into you sideways, I guess you sort of need solid construction.

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Our building also has grass growing on the roof. No seriously.

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It’s actually fairly common here, it’s also a good idea. In our case there’s so much grass that they even have to come mow it.

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It looks much nicer when it’s mowed.

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Naturally a lot the clipped grass ended up pilled up in the walk ways, or bunched up on our welcome mat. That was a kind of a pain. The street cleaner did come clean up everything in the street though, which was neat (except for Clifford, he hates street cleaners for some reason that we have never understood).

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Speaking of plants, Iceland doesn’t have much in the way of trees. I mean, I guess this isn’t a huge surprise. The environment itself isn’t conducive to tall vegetation (see wind), but a lot of the forests that were here got chopped down by the Vikings a long time ago. So most of the vegetation you see scattered around was intentionally (re)planted, and even then there isn’t a ton of variety in the trees. The cool thing is that while evergreens are definitely popular, a fair chunk of the trees are actually seasonal – which means you still get fall colors (even if nothing like New England). For example, here’s a photo from a bit ago showing some trees on campus just starting to change.0000000000

All those leaves are completely gone now, and have been for awhile – which is a bit more depressing. However, the change was fairly gradual in the leaves, so we had a few good weeks of colors!0000000000

We also had a crazy explosion of mushrooms around us! There for a week or two mushrooms were everywhere!

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I’m pretty sure Pig has since ate them all.

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In other plant news, we acquired three buddies to liven up our apartment!

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Yep! SB found someone who was getting ready to move and couldn’t take their plants, so we got them! They are three aloe plants, and their names are from left to right: Þorunn, Gunter, and Logi – none of which are pronounced the way you probably think they are. 🙂

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They live on the little table where our router is, right next to our big balcony windows. We won’t be able to take plants with us (which is why we didn’t even consider bringing any of our current buddies) so we were mixed on whether to get any here, but I’m glad SB got them! So much happier with plant friends. They seem to be doing well, as they are just babies. Their biggest threat in the beginning was a certain porcine predator.0000000000

Yes, Poor Pig, he wanted to eat them so bad. But he got scalded and then had a big ole’ piggy pout.

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However he’s since came to understand that Þorunn, Gunter, and Logi are friends, and not for eating. We feed him lots of oat biscuits from Bónus (our regular grocery store, featuring a pig mascot!) to keep him happy too, which probably helps.

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The Boys also like the rainbows. Like I mentioned before, rainbows are pretty constant thing here – and even manage to crop up on otherwise icky days.

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Sometimes you get lucky and can see almost the full arc, complete with Icelandic leprechauns (i.e. gnomes) at the end.

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I guess rainbows are a good segue into the weather in general, which is itself tied to the rising tides of darkness. A good bit ago we woke one morning to a little bit of snow on Esja in the distance.

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That was pretty much the beginning of the dark times. Since then we’ve been losing daylight, and fast. As an example, take this photo from around 9:00am from October 11th.

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A decent amount of light, right?

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Welp it’s still dark now. Heck, when I get up at 6:20 – 6:40 the northern lights are still out, and at 8:00am if feels more like 3am than 8:00am. I mean, seriously, it’s pitch black – and when you manage to pull yourself out of bed you know you’ve got hours more of darkness ahead of you. That’s only going to keep getting worse for the next 1.5 months. SB and I are not especially excited about that. In fact the darkness has really been the only thing that’s been hard about living here. Second to that is probably the fact that online shopping basically doesn’t exist, lol.

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The Fall has also brought some crazy wind. Yes it’s raining, but that’s normal. It rains so much you just sort of forget it’s raining. It’s also usually windy, but this had been some hardcore wind.

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SB and I have lived in windy places since 2010, each progressively more windy than the last. Here the wind is so bad that literally all the lines (power, etc.) have to be underground. Plus, I’ve walked through some Nor Easters, and those definitely, definitely sucked – however, there was a wind storm here a few weeks ago where I legitimately thought I could have glided if I jumped in the air. It was picking outdoor furniture up and moving it – for real, and I don’t mean plastic lawn chairs, I mean furniture. We couldn’t open our windows or balcony door – as in, we physically couldn’t open them due to the wind pressure. It was bonkers. Yet the planes still came into the domestic airport. Sure they were (literally) landing sideways, but one thing I’ve noticed about the Icelandic and Greenlandic pilots that we get to watch at the airport is that they give no shits. This isn’t the international airport down in Keflavík (you don’t actually fly into Reykjavík from most places – we didn’t either). We live near the domestic airport, which is obviously domestic, but also handles a lot of Greenland flights.

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Those arctic pilots don’t care. “Oh lookee there 500mph winds, nuclear fallout, a Russian invasion, Y3K, herpes, and a vortex to hell – no worries we’ll just land upside down, sideways, while simultaneously on fire and frozen.”

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One night it was bad, yet here comes the ole’ 1947 prop plane from Greenland, just flying in there sideways like a boss because peeps gotta have their noms. I like watching them. Heck, I think if the one of the volcanoes erupt again these guys will just fly into it, because that’s a shortcut to Australia.

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But alas, not all of us were born with the stock of arctic pilots. So instead we hide inside with our tasty coffee.

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Yes it should come as no surprise that SB and I purchased a French Press within the first 10 hours of being in Iceland. 🙂

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We’ve also found a brand of oat milk from Sweden called Oatly which is super delicious with both hot and coldbrew coffee!

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In other food news, we’ve been eating a lot of lamb. Whereas chicken had traditionally been our staple, chicken is INSANELY expensive here (~$23 for a pack o’ tendies), it’s now become lamb and fish, because lamb is decently cheap and fish is well.. still expensive, but comparatively less so. We’ve also been eating a lot of eggs, because eggs are cheap despite chicken flesh being expensive.

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In fact the expense of food has limited us quite a bit. For example, we no longer really go “out” on our Friday Date Nights. It can legitimately be $25 per person, with no drinks, to eat – and that’s just a hamburger place. If you add in beers, then god have mercy on your soul. Really you should plan to spend $30-40 per person at your average place. For instance SB and I went out once, got 2 beers and an appetizer and it was like $36 during Happy Hour. Yeap.

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So, in order to make up for our inability to go “out” we now go to the store and get something special for dinner. This something is normally boxed pizza, because it’s cheap and decently good. We’ve, of course, also continued our tradition of getting a Friday night treat as well! The treat is much more variable, though one thing we’ve found that is super yummy are these mini-cinnamon rolls.

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There is also a local chocolate company with the awesome name of Omnom Chocolate Factory that we’ve had a few times, but like most things their candy is really pricey. We actually want to go do the factory tour, but even that is really expensive.

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Still, we don’t let finances stop us from exploring culinary stuff entirely, and besides we’ve found a few cheap things to try out. A good example is lakkrís (licorice). Icelanders seem to love their lakkrís, it exists as everything – to the point that even lakkrís ice-cream seems normal. However, there is one thing you have to be careful about with their lakkrís. Some of it contains ammonium chloride (sound familiar?) – for realsies. For example, take Opal – a super popular traditional Icelandic lakkrís.

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If you get the red box, you can prepare yourself for lakkrís pellets that taste like cough drops. Not too bad, but nothing you’d be clamoring to consume either. HOWEVER, should you get the green box…

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…well then, let’s just say that some stones are best left unturned.

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The good news is that some of the lakkrís is absolutely delicious.

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That package is quite good. I mean, it’s licorice (read: not Twizzlers or Red Vines) so if you don’t like licorice-licorice you won’t like it, but I happen to be a fan of licorice (just not, you know, licorice laced with Borax).

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Of course if licorice isn’t your thing, they also have lots of non-lakkrís candies, as shown by Pigsten.

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And, if I’m going to mention food and candy, then I have to mention beer.

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If there is one thing I have to say about beer in Iceland it’s this: prepare thyself for poverty. Alcohol in general is more expensive here than anyplace else I’ve ever been (with the exception of Kaktovik). If you are eating out (and not in a happy hour), don’t be surprised if you pay $14 for a beer, and if you want to head to the store for a six-pack, prepare to spend about $25 for the six-pack, and that’s just for normal beer, not the fancy stuff.0000000000

Which brings me to my next point, the state regulates the sale of booze, so you have to go to state-owned liquor stores to buy real alcohol. These stores are called Vínbúðin, and there are about 48 of them in the entire country. Outside of those stores, you’ll be forced to go out (and pay $14 for a beer) or go to the store and buy “near-beer.” Near beers are those.. uh.. near beers, which range from 0.0% to around 2.5% ABV. These “beers” also range in quality from “I’d rather be in a gulag” to “Pretty decent.” One of them holds the title of being the worst beer I’ve ever had in my life, but I’ll talk about that in another post.

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Point being, a lot of what I get is these “near-beers,” and that’s for two reasons. First, price. You can get a big can of near-beer for as low as 99 cents. Second, availability. I can walk 2 minutes and get a near-beer. Getting to the closest Vínbúðin requires significantly more effort. Plus they randomly drive their cars on the sidewalks here while parking (no really). That said, a Taco cannot survive on near-beer alone, so occasional trips to Vínbúðin are a must.

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They have a pretty good stock of local, European, and Murkan’ beers at the locations we’ve been too. Of course they are expensive, but beer is life. As far as quality goes, Icelandic beers have been good. Anymore I don’t think any one country has beer on lock-down. I think it’s more brewer-to-brewer since the micro-boom. I’ve had a couple that were really good, and then I’ve had some that were meh. Just like any other place. The moral of the story is that there is plenty of good beer here, I just can’t afford most of it. 🙂

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But for those I do purchase, I even have a special little shelf – that’s how important they are to me.

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In reality I have to keep them in there because our refrigerator is the size of a shoebox. But hey, that doesn’t stop us from telling stories on it with magnets!

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Indeed, our apartment has a lot of quirks. From the Scandinavian-style shower that really isn’t a shower in the traditional sense, to the cabinets designed for giants, to water pressure that will rip your skin off, to the tiny little sink that gives you a bath (NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO) due to said water pressure. Yes, when coupled with the fact that we pulled most of our furniture out of the basement or trash area, it’s been an interesting time.

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I think the most interesting thing has been our bed. That’s a story that deserves to be told.

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Before we arrived we had decided that for both practical and cost-related reasons that we were going to forgo a bonafide bed and that we were going to try to get futon/pad/thing instead. This ended up being more difficult than we anticipated, because there are certain things that Iceland just doesn’t have (like folders, I’m legitimately serious, they don’t have normal folders here). It also got expensive, really quick, and after a bunch of frustration and two trips to IKEA we managed to cabbage together a bed unlike any bed I’ve ever had before.

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Yes, you are seeing that correctly.

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Our bed is a cheap futon pad, which has literally been cut into two pieces with scissors. Then, we mashed a bunch of plastic into wads and shoved that between the pads. Then we stuck a mattress pad on top of that, and then put a sheet on that and called it a bed. Yep. We also have one single comforter-type thing, no sheets. It’s most definitely janky, but it works.

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You may be wondering why the plastic? Well, that’s because the mattress pad alone wasn’t enough padding, and then the futon pad wasn’t big enough, so the mattress pad hung way over the edges. So you’d roll off the bed. So in order to fix that we could either spend $100 more for another pad, or get creative. I might be going for a post-doc, but a completely helpless academic I am not. I took some plastic out of the trash, rolled and taped dat’ shit up, and boom, bedtime. It’s been working for 3 months now, don’t hate.

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Now, the bed itself is decently comfy (one must have realistic expectations when sleeping on plastic and destroyed furniture). However, the sleep I get here is consistently the worst of any apartment SB and I have ever had. This is due to a couple of things. First, we have no fan. I’ve been sleeping with a fan for about 12 years now. A standard box-fan will run you $75+ dollars here (and you have to find it in the first place, fans aren’t really growing on trees in feckin’ Iceland). SB does have a rain app on her phone that helps some, but it’s not the same.

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The second reason, and the WAY more enraging one, is that we are surrounded by undergrads (in fact there is a party going on while I write this). Honestly I don’t feel like I need give any further explanation. To make matters worse, Iceland follows the Europe drinking culture of “Drink at home until 11:30pm then go out.” That sounds good on its surface, right? You’d think that it meant that the loud parties stopped around that time. The truth is not really. Generally at least one group will “stay in” which is all it takes for things to stay loud. Then, around 3am – 4am (or later) you get everyone rolling back in and seemingly playing an entire f*cking game of soccer in their apartment while wearing plate-mail armor and hitting the walls with sledgehammers. It’s insane. Like I explained, this building is basically solid concrete and steel. I can jump up and down on the floor and barely make any noise – yet these people scream and bang so loudly that it sounds like they are in your apartment at 4 o’clock in the morning – and this just isn’t on party days, this EVERY DAMN DAY. In fact, sometimes they are so loud you can hear them over SB’s phone rain AND the ear plugs you are wearing. Yes, I have to wear earplugs to sleep – almost every damn night. It appears to be giving me a nearly constant ear ache in my right ear too. It is TOTALLY AWESOME.

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To be fair to the building as a whole (but not really, they’re all loud), it seems like we got totally screwed with the luck of the draw. Of our entire building, the two loudest apartments are on each side of us – and that’s not just because we’re between them. You can literally walk to the other side of the building and it’s still those two apartments you hear. Then I’m convinced the people above us set off TNT charges randomly at 2am, that or ICBMs are randomly hitting the roof of the building. I have no idea what the flying f*ck they are doing, but they’ve legitimately got to have a bulldozer up there or something.

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But hey, at least the people below us don’t make much noise [Edit: nope, the day I posted this they apparently decided to open a blasting zone in their apartment at 2am – this is why I can’t say nice things on my blog]. But hey T-Rex that lives in their window also turned out to be a light!

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So yeah. Knowing what I know now I can safely say I’d never, ever have chosen these apartments if I’d not been a moron and realized that they would include undergrads. Harvard quarantined the undergrads into their own little hives of misery, Háskóli Íslands does not.

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But I suppose that’s as good as spot as any to shift the discussion to school itself, you know, the whole “fake” reason we came here in the first place. I say fake because SB and I were pretty transparent that moving here had little to do with school, that was more of a residence permit checkbox than anything else. Yet, despite it’s secondary status, it is the thing that eats up most of our existence. So what’s that bit of our life like? Well, I can’t speak for SB, but I can share some of my experiences in my post-doc program.

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First, a little about the school itself.

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Yes, I’m reusing this photo.

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We go to Háskóli Íslands (The University of Iceland).

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Háskóli Íslands is the largest (and objectively best, because I go there) of the seven schools in Iceland. To best honest I didn’t even realize there were seven, I only ever really hear about four: Háskóli Íslands, Háskólinn á Akureyri, Háskólinn á Bifröst, and Háskólinn í Reykjavík (which is Háskóli Íslands’ rival). Háskóli Íslands (henceforth HI) has something like 13,200 students. It’s by far the largest university in Iceland, but still fairly small by Murkan’ standards where schools like Ohio State have 743,000 students.

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At HI, I unsurprisingly attend the law school, which is technically called the “Faculty of Law” and is located with the “School of Social Sciences.” I have no idea how big the law school itself is, but it’s not big.

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I take a mix of classes (all law), and I’ve noticed a few interesting things. First, grading is on a 0 – 10 scale and they use the European Credit System (ECTS). I don’t understand it. You take like 1 zillion credits, and 1 credit hour doesn’t seem to actually equal 1 hour. For example I have a class that is, by itself, 10 credits – yet I don’t spend no freaking 10 hours a week in that class (not that I’d show up if I was supposed to anyways). Second, written law exams are not as common – they are instead oral and much shorter. Third, despite the lack of written exams, papers are way more popular. Fourth, cold-calling barely exists at all – and if you cold-call an Icelander or one of the European students they seem to die inside. The one exception to this is that I have one professor who does cold call, and perhaps unsurprisingly, he is an HLS graduate (we are cockroaches, I tell you – though it is kinda fun to watch people who’ve never experienced a cold call before fall like dominoes). Fifth, people are way more passive compared to what I am used to. Whereas a simple question could generate deathly blood-feuds at HLS, here it’s more like “Oh you think we should eat babies? Ok.” –> goes back to browsing Facebook. Sixth, hand-raising isn’t a thing. It’s just who can shout the loudest. Seventh – having a better grasp of English than your professors pays HUGE dividends when it comes time to communicate. Sure they can speak 27 languages whereas I speak one, but oh yeah I speak that one better. AMERICA FERK’ YEAR’.

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Blow it out your ass and send them to the God they wish they knew.

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So far things are going well academically. I’ve gotten “First Class” grades in the two classes I’ve got grades for so far (the schedule is weird, I have two classes which are already done) – though to be honest I’m not entirely sure what that translates to, other than that First is better than Second. I’ll probably discuss school more in the future once I’ve finished up the first semester and know more about my timeline. Overall it’s a bit of a mixed bag, it’s not what I thought it would be, with more of a lean towards the negative than the positive, but it’s not bad by any means. I think I’ll be more engaged once I can start focusing on my own research, which will hopefully be sooner rather than later. I mean, doing my own research is the main reason I did this program in the first place. Sitting in a class with people who don’t even have a Masters yet (FILTHY FECKIN’ PLEBS) is not.

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If it wasn’t obvious from my rant about living with undergrads, we live near the school. In truth our commute is pretty freaking awesome. I can be in class in 6 minutes. It’s amazing. Our neighborhood is Vesturbær which is kind of divided by Route 49 (Nesbraut – which at 4 lanes is the largest in the entire country). One one side is HI, construction, houses, 1 tiny overpriced store, and the airport. On the other is all sorts of cool stuff. I’ll let you guess which side we live on. Fortunately it’s pretty easy to cross over to cool-side land.

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It’s a pretty neighborhood when the weather is right.

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Plus, like I’ve mentioned before, Tjörnin is right in the middl(ish) of it.

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And with Tjörnin comes duckies, geese, swans, and 9 octrillion seagulls (who are assholes, but still friends).

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It’s a very pretty place, and while our walk-commute to the store is fairly long (especially on the way back with all the groceries), it’s nice that part of the walk takes us through such a pretty area.

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But mostly I just like all the duckies. 🙂

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This area (a bit further from us) also has stuff like the Icelandic parliament, Alþingi – I discussed that part of town a bit more here.

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So that’s kind of a general overview of where we live – in a noisy undergrad-dominated complex, near a construction site, an airport, the university, and across the country’s largest highway from some duckies. I don’t make it sound too great, but really it’s not that bad, we both know I like to whine. Most of the stuff doesn’t bother me, it’s really just undergrads – who, for reference, I still hated while I was one.

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In general, life here is just that, life. SB and I do most of the same things as before, some less-so due to cost, but our general schedule is the same. It’s cold, rainy, and windy – but we do get rainbows! Some stuff is impossible to find (ibuprofen, for example) but there are new things to find, which keeps things exciting – especially when you can’t even read the box. 🙂

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But then there are other things that you wouldn’t expect to find, but do – like pumpkins!

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Yes, despite not traditionally celebrating Halloween, the holiday has started to creep into Icelandic culture (as it should, Halloween = best holiday). We might have ended up getting a pumpkin, but that’s a story for next time. 😉

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All in all, this time in the “Land of Fire and Ice” is definitely a crazy adventure we’ve set out on, but it’s nothing we can’t handle. Right now both SB and I are in agreement that the encroaching darkness is the most difficult part about it. We’ve stocked up on Omega 3 + Vitamin D supplements, but at a certain point oppressive blackness is just flat-out depressing (side note: Icelanders consume more antidepressants per capita than any other country in the world). So if you were wondering why I started this post off with that relatively “dark” quote from the Lord of the Rings, it’s because 1) Quoting Tolkien is always relevant (fight me), and 2) the continuous darkness has been the biggest challenge we’ve faced on this adventure so far – but we won’t give up!

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I am many things, and stubborn as holy living shit is one of them. 🙂

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So that’s about that. I rambled a lot, and this post sort of covers a bit of the more mundane and random info I’ve thought about while writing other posts. It also does a good job of setting the current scene, which is full of looming deadlines, fading sunlight, and declining temperatures. Oh yes, winter is coming – we only need to look to the horizon.

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Actually it ended up showing right after I wrote this, but hey, I have a 180 degree view of mountains. So at least I can take in a pristine view while I eat laundry detergent candies, rotten fish, drink my $75 beer, and slowly go insane from endless darkness!

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ICELAND FERK’ YEAR’ – HEALTHCARE FOR ALL, CHECKMATE AMERIFATS

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But really, it’s not too shabby here. Life’s too short to be afraid of the dark.

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Until next time,
-Taco

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[Author’s Note: The formatting got super screwed up on this post for some reason. Because I’m at my wit’s end with such blogging issues, I used a very “lazy” way of fixing it. So if you are observant and tend to read between the lines, know that it’s not you, it’s me. 🙂 ]

I’m in the middle of what is looking to be the craziest stretch of this semester, but that’s all I’m going to say about that. For this post I want to focus on much more exciting things than law school. More specifically, Pig turned two last week! We celebrate quite a few birthdays in the Taco household these days, but we don’t let that diminish the fun. This is especially true since our birthdays tend to be a multi-day event anymore, largely because we are often too busy to limit celebrations to any one day.

Pig is a big fan of spring, which works out nicely since his birthday is in spring. That said, we went through a bit of a rough patch with spring that left all of us sitting inside and twiddling our thumbs (or rather, doing school work) as we waited for the nice weather.

And wait we did. For like a solid week it just rained.

In many ways it was like we were stuck in a weird spring Twilight Zone. On the one hand spring activities were starting – such as grounds-keeping at the law school:

– but on the other hand it was still way too cold.

But not all was dreary, because despite the rain – a certain little piglet turned two! Now, Pig is a creature of many talents. In addition to be a certified Yoga Therapist with over 2,000 hours logged, Pig also likes to wallow in mud – especially if there are grubs in the mud to snack on. Beyond his staple of grubs, Pig is also a big fan of berries, peanut butter, and worms – as well as anything tuber. So, as Pig’s 2nd birthday approached we decided to share a PB&J yogurt for breakfast one morning!

But not content with packaged noms, we then endeavored to make our own homemade strawberry-grape jam! It turned out super yummy – also it was National Peanut Butter & Jelly Day!

And this was all just the buildup to the big day! Pig’s actual birthday fell on a Wednesday this year, which is a long day for both SB and I. So we decided to add some birthday flare to our Wednesday morning coffee date before everyone went their separate ways. I got the idea to add a little treat to Pig’s breakfast.

Truth be told, Pig had never had Fig Newtons before – and it had been many years since I’d had them myself. So I took a gamble and made the assumption that Pig would probably love figs. It was a safe bet.

Pig was hugely ecstatic about “Pig’s Figs,” and he gobbled them down with his coffee, homemade jam PB&J, and yogurt. All of this after a morning run! It was a good birthday breakfast by all accounts. Once our yummy breakfast was over we had to get back to work, and we worked until Friday afternoon where we met up with Aunt Train for (an also yummy) dinner and drinks at Emmets Pub. After getting back home and settling in – the real treat of Pig’s 2nd birthday celebration was unveiled. Dirt pudding!

Pig had dirt pudding for the first time for his birthday last year, and was very excited to have it again. So, over the course of several days SB and I accumulated the ingredients from different stores – with the last ingredients requiring me to walk 35 minutes in the pouring rain on Thursday, but it was worth it! Pig was very happy and we all got fat and pompous from the delicious dirt pudding, with worms of course!

Another nice thing is that the weather has really improved since last week. The constant rain and cold has given way to sunshine and warm temperatures. Over the weekend (while I was in a team meeting, go figure) Pig and SB took advantage of the weather and did some reading in a nearby park!

Another exciting bit of news is that Pigsten has acquired a new “rock” – this time a “gift” from SB. SB had a training at work where they used these little green “stones” as part of an exercise. Well, as soon as SB brought that bad boy home Pigsten cabbaged right onto it, and it has been his ever since! One does not simply bring rocks, or rock-like-objects, into Pigsten’s dominion and hope to retain ownership of them. 🙂

Plus, since Spring is finally here – I naturally had to adopt a Tulip on Plant Nanny (oh you silly person did you really think I wouldn’t talk about my plants? 😛 ).

Tooley the Tulip – while fitting for spring – was EXPENSIVE! She cost 300 seeds, but hey at least her yellow pot was free! Tooley is also the highest difficulty plant I’ve raised thus far, and while I’ve kept her hydrated and happy, progress has been slow. I’d normally be half way through level 3 by now, but Tooley is just chilling on level 2. 🙂

Edit: Well, ask and you shall receive, Tooley just leveled up!

Look at that big ole’ Tulip noggin!

However, from the looks of the progress bar level 3 going to take a loooong time (and so level 4 will be even longer).

Anyways, that’s all for now. I just wanted to share the fun times we have with Pig for his birthday! I have a lot of work to get back to, as I have a big presentation coming up (and naturally it happens on the only day in the whole week it’s supposed to rain) as well as a bunch of other stuff I mentioned here. But, I can’t complain too much with the nice sunny weather we are having for the moment, and Pig agrees – via “Oink!”